Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/160

140 main land, on the steep but well-protected cliff, which bears to the present day the venerable name of the mother-city in Anatolia. Nowhere in Italy, moreover, were the scenes of the legends of Asia Minor so vividly and tenaciously localized as in the district of Cumæ, where the earliest voyagers to the west, full of such legends of western wonders, first stepped upon the fabled land, and left perpetual traces of that world of story, which they believed that they were treading, in the rocks of the Sirens and the lake of Avernus that led to the other world. On the supposition, moreover, that it was in Cumæ that the Greeks first became the neighbours of the Italians, it is easy to explain why the name of that Italian stock, which was settled immediately around Cumæ, the name of Opicans, came to be employed by them for many centuries afterwards to designate the Italians collectively. There is a further credible tradition, that a considerable interval elapsed between the settlement at Cumæ and the main Hellenic emigration into Lower Italy and Sicily, and that in that emigration Ionians from Chalcis and from Naxos took the lead. Naxos, in Sicily, is said to have been the oldest of all the Greek towns founded by strict colonization in Italy or Sicily; the Achæan and Dorian colonizations followed, but not until a later period.

It appears, however, to be quite impossible to fix the dates of this series of events with even approximate accuracy. The founding of the Achæan city of Sybaris, in and that of the Dorian city Tarentum, in, may be taken as a basis in such an inquiry—the most ancient dates in Italian history, the correctness or at least approximation to correctness of which may be looked upon as established. But how far beyond that epoch the earlier Ionian colonies reached back, is quite as uncertain as is the age which gave birth to the poems of Hesiod or even of Homer. If Herodotus is correct in the period which he assigns to Homer, the Greeks were still unacquainted with Italy a century before the foundation of Rome. The date thus assigned, however, like all other statements respecting the Homeric age, is matter not of testimony, but of inference, and whoever carefully weighs the history of the Italian alphabets and the remarkable fact, that the Italians had become acquainted with the Greek nation before the newer name "Hellenes" had supplanted the older national desig-